THE 2000 CAMPAIGN: THE RECORD; In Congress, Gore Selected Issues Ready for Prime Time

The Democratic freshman class that was elected to the House of Representatives in 1976 was a remarkable one, loaded with bright and ambitious young reformers who blended the idealism of their generation with the cynicism bred by Watergate and Vietnam. Many would go on to bigger things -- Richard A. Gephardt to the top of the House Democratic leadership, Leon E. Panetta to the White House as chief of staff, Barbara A. Mikulski to the Senate.

But even in this hotbed of ambition, Al Gore stood out. As former Representative Jim Cooper of Tennessee put it, ''Al was never a backbencher.'' Almost as soon as they arrived on Capitol Hill, members of the class of '76 began looking for ways to break out of the pack. Some, like Mr. Gephardt, played the inside game, building the personal alliances essential for rising in Congressional leadership. Others, like Mr. Gore, a young Tennessean with a famous political name, preferred the outside game.

It was not his way to twist arms or trade favors. While he made friends, particularly on the basketball court in the House gym, backslapping was not his political strong suit. Instead, Mr. Gore, who was 28 when first elected, went methodically about the task of identifying issues -- many slightly obscure but all deadly serious -- that he could make his own.

Throughout his 16 years in Congress, 8 in the House and then 8 in the Senate before becoming Bill Clinton's running mate, Mr. Gore was strikingly effective at winning attention by championing just-over-the-horizon consumer-oriented causes. Toxic-waste dumping. Genetic testing. Global warming.

He reveled in the details, in mastering the arcana of arms control or computer technology, issues the average politician might find bloodless or simply too hard, then trying to popularize those issues with the voters at large.

So effective was his strategy, and so media-savvy his approach, that former Senator Alan K. Simpson of Wyoming, once the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, remembered: ''We called him Prime Time Al. That's what he was known as in our cloakroom.''

Today, as Mr. Gore moves toward Los Angeles to accept his party's presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention next week, his record on Capitol Hill remains a vital part of his biography. And the debate over whether its hallmark was prescience or political expedience will rage over the next three months.

His campaign strategists say most Americans are unaware of how Mr. Gore spent the years 1977 to 1992 -- the pre-Clinton years -- and they plan to highlight that era in convention speeches and films. ''Gore throughout his career has taken on important issues well before it was fashionable to take them on,'' said Mark Fabiani, Mr. Gore's deputy campaign manager for communications.

Mr. Gore himself, when asked in a recent interview aboard Air Force Two to summarize his Congressional career, said the message was simple: ''I will not hesitate to take on any special interest that is operating to the disadvantage of the American people. And I'll never hesitate to take on any challenge, however complex or difficult.''

But the Bush campaign will portray Mr. Gore as a man who carefully crafted his Congressional career to maintain his political viability, a man with little grounding other than his own ambition. ''Al Gore's flip-flops on important issues, including guns and abortion, underscore why there's a leadership gap in this campaign,'' said Dan Bartlett, a Bush campaign spokesman.

Clearly, Mr. Gore was engaged in a balancing act for much of his Congressional career. He chose issues that pushed him to the national stage, but he was compulsive about tending his district back home. He studiously avoided the kind of polarizing debates that ultimately contributed to the defeat of his father, Senator Albert Gore Sr., in 1970. The issues the younger Gore selected had the advantage of being virtually nonideological. There was right and wrong in Mr. Gore's positioning, but rarely was there right and left.

On the most volatile controversies, like abortion and gun control, he took stands that put his conservative constituents at ease and then shifted positions as he moved from Tennessee politics to the national arena. To the extent he ever alienated the home folks, he usually managed to work his way back into their good graces by maintaining a relentless regimen of town hall meetings, sometimes five on a given Saturday.

It all left his political rivals with little room to maneuver. ''He picked out issues that unless Adolf Hitler was your idol you couldn't disagree,'' said Victor H. Ashe, the mayor of Knoxville, Tenn., and Mr. Gore's Republican opponent in his first Senate campaign in 1984. ''Organ transplant databases. More money for Alzheimer's research. Infant formula. I mean, who in their right mind is going to fight against those? He avoided any issue that could be divisive.''

Mr. Gore's ideological ratings by groups that monitor Congressional voting records typically group him as a centrist Democrat, particularly on foreign policy, with positions that grew somewhat more liberal as he moved toward his failed 1988 presidential campaign. His approval rating by the liberal Americans for Democratic Action, for instance, grew from 45 percent in his first year to 78 percent in 1990.

The A.F.L.-C.I.O. gives him a lifetime voting-record score of 88 percent, the United States Chamber of Commerce 32 percent. His most high-profile shift probably was on abortion: he moved from a reliable vote against any federal financing for abortion, with an 84 percent rating by the National Right to Life Committee, to an outspoken, unqualified advocacy of abortion rights.

But much of Mr. Gore's Congressional career was not spent in the middle of the ideological wars; his interests, his political instincts and perhaps the memory of his father pushed him elsewhere.

An Invaluable Forum

The Democratic freshmen who entered the House in the post-Watergate classes of 1974 and 1976 expected to make a difference, fast, in contrast to their predecessors' long years of quiet back-bench servitude. Mr. Gore hoped to be on the Appropriations Committee, the seat of federal largess, but he lost out to his friend and fellow freshman Norm Dicks of Washington. He landed, fortunately enough, on the Commerce Committee. Mr. Dicks recalled saying he had done Mr. Gore a favor: ''I told him, 'Now you'll be on Commerce and on TV all the time.' ''

Indeed, the Commerce Committee had purview over a wide array of consumer issues -- involving energy, the environment, health care -- and it gave Mr. Gore an invaluable forum. He got a seat on the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, and eventually became chairman of a similar subcommittee of the House Committee on Science and Technology.

From those perches, Mr. Gore quickly became known as a meticulously prepared, take-no-prisoners inquisitor, aided by his background in law and his five years as a newspaper reporter. The headlines from back home -- and some in Washington -- portrayed an aggressive young lawmaker standing up for consumers, whether he was charging monopoly practices among natural-gas pipeline companies or exposing an international uranium cartel: ''Gore: Thousands of Babies Drinking Harmful Formula?'' ''Rep. Gore Breaks Up a Monopoly.'' ''Gore Questions Contact Lens Solution Use.'' ''Gore Introduces Nationwide Transplant Organ Bill.''

It was a pattern that would continue over the years as he crusaded against the marketing of unhealthy baby formula, raised early ethical concerns about the use of genetic testing and engineering, promoted the benefits of midwifery and helped establish a national organ transplant network.

Barely past 30, Mr. Gore was in the thick of the struggle for the passage of the Superfund Act of 1980, which established a fund to clean up toxic wastes. He was also an important member of the Congressional Clearinghouse on the Future. ''We'd bring in top scientists, top futurists who were looking at technological developments, their implications for society,'' Mr. Gephardt said.

Much later, Mr. Gore would become the butt of late-night talk show jokes for his claim of having helped to create the Internet. But Congressional colleagues say he really was ahead of the curve in seeing the implications of new technologies, like computer networks and genetic testing.

''He understood the link between technology and development; he could see the future very well,'' said David E. Bonior of Michigan, now the Democratic whip. Mike Kopp, one of Mr. Gore's early aides, remembered him subscribing to scientific journals, ''obscure publications,'' at home, clipping out articles and bringing them in for his staff to review.

He certainly had his detractors, who saw his hunger for the media limelight as extraordinary, even by Washington standards. Former aides say he was skilled at cultivating reporters, studying their interests and then catering to them. Still, by most accounts Mr. Gore fit happily into the culture of the House. His father cast a formidable shadow, but as another famous son of a famous Congressman, Representative John D. Dingell put it, ''It is not looked down upon in this place'' to have a family legacy. Mr. Dingell, the Michigan Democrat who was the exceedingly powerful chairman of the Commerce Committee from 1981 to 1995, became something of a mentor to Mr. Gore.

Mr. Gore could be a demanding, micromanaging boss, traits that have extended to his campaign. In his early days, he sorted the office mail himself and insisted on reviewing and editing the most pedestrian constituent letters. Former aides said he did not take well to criticism and was not particularly solicitous of advice from underlings. Though he was accessible, he avoided both small talk and confrontation. ''Typically,'' said Mr. Kopp, ''his reaction when you criticized him was he'd either walk away or get busy doing something else.''

But he also hung out with members of the House like Tom Downey of New York, most of them young men with young families, and was among the regulars in the freewheeling basketball games at the House gym. ''I had closer friendships in the House,'' Mr. Gore said, comparing it with the Senate. ''I just, I had more fun in the House.''

Still, even in the House gym, his competitive instincts showed. Mr. Bonior recalls walking into the gym one night to find Mr. Gore on his back at midcourt, trying to make an implausible shot that others could not match. (When asked about this in an interview, Mr. Gore said without a pause, ''Not trying.'')

Addressing Arms Control

Midway through his tenure in the House, at the start of the 1980's, Mr. Gore began his move to a more national arena, obtaining a seat on the House Intelligence Committee and plunging into the most arcane field in Washington: arms control. It has become a highly burnished chapter in the official Gore story -- how he heard the persistent fears of nuclear war from the folks back home, how he embarked on a secretive yearlong tutorial on arms control with Leon Fuerth, today his national security adviser and then a top staffer with the Intelligence Committee.

By 1982, with a major speech and an article in The New Republic, one of his many essays and op-ed articles on the issue, Mr. Gore came forth with his answer: an arms control strategy that would move from big multiple-warhead missiles to smaller single-warhead missiles, which could be easily scattered and thus much harder to target, thereby reducing the advantage of a first strike.

''It was a high like you've never seen,'' Mr. Kopp recalled. ''He proved to himself and to people who didn't know him that he could get up to speed on an issue that people thought was untouchable, and he went through that course in record time with flying colors. He also thought he might have really found the key to unlocking the Iron Curtain.''

In 1983, when the Reagan administration was trying to win Congressional approval for the big multiple-warhead MX missile, Mr. Gore and like-minded colleagues sought a compromise: limited deployment of the MX, development of the smaller single-warhead Midgetman missile and a new push toward arms control. In the end, when the Midgetman went undeveloped but the MX pushed ahead, some Democrats thought Mr. Gore and his allies had been used; others praised their search for a new path.

''It's not a black and white thing,'' said Michael Krepon, president of the Henry L. Stimson Center, an international-security policy group. ''If you take a longer-range view, the outcome that Gore was pushing -- take the warheads off these land-based missiles, that single-warhead missiles are the route to stability on land -- what Gore was pushing for became conventional wisdom 15 years later.''

What was clear was that Mr. Gore was playing at a very high level of the game.

'A Raging Moderate'

Even as he became a more prominent national figure, doing the Sunday talk shows and finding his name in assessments of presidential timber, Mr. Gore was careful to return to Tennessee whenever possible.

His father's defeat by Bill Brock had provided the great political lesson of his life. As the Republicans gained a foothold in the South, the senior Mr. Gore became vulnerable because he had opposed the Vietnam War, supported civil rights (for the most part) and become a Washington fixture who did not go home much. The younger Gore would not make the same mistake.

He started as a freshman, making the trip every weekend, driving maniacally down country roads in a Dodge Omni, staying for an hour or so regardless of whether he was speaking to 50 people or to 5. ''Whenever two or three people got together, Al would be there,'' said former Senator James R. Sasser of Tennessee, who served with Mr. Gore.

One minute Mr. Gore would be jotting down the name of an elderly woman who needed help with her Social Security check. The next he would be using coffee-cup missiles to explain his arms control proposals. Those who watched him then said he seemed far more natural than he does now.

The meetings served him well when he had to cast tough votes, as he did against Ronald Reagan's tax cuts. ''People were standing up and saying you better vote for this, and Al would just talk about why he thought it was a bad idea,'' said Steve Owens, an early House aide. ''It proved his theory that if you came back enough and made yourself accountable, people would understand even if you disagree with them.''

To the extent that he could, Mr. Gore minimized opportunities for disagreement. In line with his district, he opposed both Medicaid financing of abortion and most forms of gun control, positions that he changed as he felt the lure of national politics. ''There's no doubt that I changed my position,'' he said, but he noted that many Democrats had evolved on such issues.

Clearly, though, Mr. Gore had no interest in leading on divisive topics. ''On the abortion stuff, he was never out front,'' said former Representative Peter H. Kostmayer, a Democratic member of the class of '76 from Pennsylvania. ''I never noticed how he voted. He did it quietly. I was surprised to read that he had ever been antichoice.''

Mr. Gore called himself ''a raging moderate,'' and it worked. After a close first election, he ran unopposed in 1978, won with 79 percent in 1980 and was unopposed again in 1982.

It seemed almost preordained when Howard H. Baker Jr. of Tennessee announced his intention to retire from the Senate that Mr. Gore would take his seat. But Mr. Gore did not find the easy fit in the Senate that he had found in the House.

He was young for a senator, 36, and entering an institution where seniority mattered, deeply. He had been chairman of a subcommittee in the House, but now he was a junior member of his committees, including Commerce and, eventually, Armed Services.

''We went to dinner one night at a restaurant on the Hill, and he was talking about his frustrations, trying to figure out ways to get back involved in environmental issues,'' Mr. Owens recalled. ''In the middle of it, he just looks at me and says, 'You know, sometimes I wonder if this was such a smart idea.' ''

He did find a way to pursue his interests. He played a major role in probing NASA after the Challenger disaster in 1986. He was an early voice warning about the dangers of global warming. He worked on legislation that promoted high-performance computing and networking projects, and was an early champion of the Internet. (Mr. Gore steps carefully around that accomplishment today, after overstating his role last year.) He maintained a high profile in national security matters, serving as a member, for example, of a Senate observer group for arms control talks in Geneva in 1985. And he continued his tutorials on various issues.

But his tenure in the Senate was framed by two presidential campaigns -- the one he conducted in 1988 and the one many expected him to conduct in 1992. His opponents argued that as his national ambitions grew, his hunger for the spotlight was all-consuming.

''He didn't show up in legislating, like Kennedy or the people I dealt with,'' said former Senator Simpson. ''He showed up in the news cycle.'' Critics saw political calculations everywhere in Mr. Gore's Senate years -- including his decision to break with his party and vote to authorize President Bush to wage war on Iraq.

Mr. Gore described his vote as one of 10 Democrats to authorize the Persian Gulf war as ''excruciatingly difficult,'' indeed the toughest of his career. He dismissed those who viewed it as a political vote, saying that in fact it jeopardized his ability to win Democratic presidential primaries. ''It was anything but a political vote,'' he said.

But Mr. Simpson asserts that Mr. Gore bargained with the Republicans over how much speaking time he would get -- and when -- before he made his decision, an assertion dismissed by the Gore campaign and other Democrats. George Mitchell, the majority leader at the time, scoffed: ''They've been trying to peddle that for eight years.''

The vote that seemed so politically dangerous at the time proved highly auspicious for Mr. Gore's political future, with the gulf war considered a resounding military success. But as the 1992 election approached, it seemed ever more apparent to Mr. Gore's aides that he would not run, at least not at the top of the ticket. He focused more and more on favorite issues -- notably global warming -- that had proven so hard to translate into a presidential campaign agenda in 1988.

''I was disappointed in myself in '88,'' Mr. Gore said, ''by the extent to which I responded to the deafening silence on those issues by muting my own discussion of them and shifting into sort of cookie-cutter issues.''

In the end, Congressional scholars say, Mr. Gore's time in Congress will be remembered for his persistence on those issues. ''If you were to pick the master coalition builders in Congress, Al Gore wouldn't be on that list,'' said Norman J. Ornstein, an expert on Congress at the American Enterprise Institute. ''But if you were to pick the master agenda setters, he definitely would.''

This much was clear, though. By the time Bill Clinton called, Al Gore had broken from the pack.

Political Journeys

This is the 11th in a series of articles about the lives of the presidential candidates. Future installments will examine Gov. George W. Bush's work in his father's White House and Vice President Al Gore's writings on the environment.

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A version of this article appears in print on August 13, 2000, on Page 1001001 of the National edition with the headline: THE 2000 CAMPAIGN: THE RECORD; In Congress, Gore Selected Issues Ready for Prime Time. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe